Hearted Youtube comments on Based Camp with Simone & Malcolm Collins (@SimoneandMalcolm) channel.
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This is going to sound sociopathic via text, so please understand this is a deliberately value-free analysis and is not an endorsement of vigilantism in a moral sense.
In many ways, vigilantism helped build higher societies. No tribe emerged from the primordial aether with bureaucratized and abstracted concepts of legality and ethics which in any way resembled high civilizations.
Vigilantism was one of the costs "priced in" by social codes. If you screwed a man hard enough, he might just come for you. You can see this reflected in folk wisdom such as "nothing more dangerous than a man with nothing to lose". That cute little adage isn't saying "oh, those with nothing on the line try harder", it's warning that once someone has no chips left on the game board, they might flip the table.
History is replete with this echo: "surrender with honor", "allowing an exit", "chose to retire", etc. In our very safe, very insulated, very civilized world, these might seem quant or be accepted as received moral precepts, but they are based on a firm inherited calculus: every man, no matter how reasonable, has a point where he'll turn to tooth and claw, if only to make you bleed with him.
We might think of our age as one built on these costs, but so managed that we no longer pay them. Unjust words no longer result in duels, but we say slander is bad. The shopkeeper no longer has to beat thieves, because the justice system punishes theft. And the tribe doesn't have to mob-justice the degenerate who wrecked the common green, because social shame makes the idea of transgressing abhorrent, well before the thought of violence arises.
Or rather... our society was functional. For a blip of time in the late modernity, the West managed to reach an amazing peak. We'd priced in vigilantism to our social systems so efficiently that the vigilantism was no longer ever actioned. Unfortunately, over time this lead to virtuous violence being classed as mere violence, and morally equal to unjust violence. Like many modern ills, this wasn't felt at first, as the moral inertia of the old system propelled behavior that was no longer incentivized by the current market. Slowly, though, new actors came about in an age with new incentives, and they better adapted to their environment.
If a powerful CEO can get ahead with profit maximization through legal murder, and the only penalty is a fractional hit on a rocketing upward graph? Why not? The only external cost is some disapproval from people he doesn't care about. He's optimized for his environment, because he's recognized that the formerly "priced in" vigilantism behind that disapproval has been replaced with a memory of said vigilantism, like a vestigial clause in a defunct contract.
We've been at this point for some time. The grinding inhumanity of our era would have brought our ancestors to violence long before. We've constrained this through the anti-agentic "all violence is (equally) bad" propaganda.
So yes, this murder, and moreover, the general public acceptance, is indicative of social degeneration. But it's not a descent from normality. It's a return. A ball was thrown into the air, and for a time (the late twentieth and early twenty first centuries) it seemed to hang suspended at its apex, but it has now begun to fall.
The proper response is to recognize where we are, what we are, the historical anomaly we are exiting, and decide how to proceed.
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My parents are Korean, and my sister and I were born here in the states. Basically, my parents convinced my sister and I, that we were such defective human beings, that we, on our own, decided that we should not reproduce. (All the while, they would encourage us to have kids. Note that we had high class rankings in school and my sister and I both went to an Ivy league school.) I am still aghast at having discovered that my mom was just tuning out everything we said, and just using emotional weapons against us to dismiss what we said and just shut us up -- but doing this in such a way, that it was portrayed like they were so much wiser than us and just thought everything we said was just stupid and terrible. I finally figured this out through my 40's, and I started asking my mom what she thought I had just said. It wasn't Alzheimers. She was just put together in such a way, that she never registered anything we said or thought it would matter. I don't know if I've explained this clearly, or even if anyone might believe me, but really, I don't know how to process this.
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I'm an academic running a lab in a research-intensive US university, and I rely on federal funding to do medical research. Even though my job could be at risk, I cannot understate how grossly corrupt universities, academic medical centers, and the research enterprise are. We need a shake-up, because universities are failing in their fiduciary responsibilities to taxpayers who have given them the benefit of the doubt for decades. I'm a citizen first and a scientist second. As a scientist, I'm so overwhelmed with bureaucracy that I spend 100% of my regularly allotted effort on it. I'm no different from most of my peers. We then spend very little of our time actually thinking about science, doing bench work, and mentoring/training people. I would gladly take a pay cut to just get back time, energy, and cognitive space to do science, whether that's in a corporation, government agency, or reconceptualized university.
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As a Nigerian, here's my simple answer: Bad geography, poor social and economic systems, poor political systems, failing legal and social institutions, dutch disease, tribalism and others. During the golden age of Islam, under Harun al-Rashid, the civilization was experiencing great economic, social and scientific development and Islam was moderatingbabd becoming more Secular until Orthodox pushback from Imams and others caused these changes to stop. Then, the Christian West embraced modernity and reform and advanced in all fields. The fact that Christianity abolished institutions like slavery, broke clan structures by removing cousin marriage, and stopped the ban on usary which led to stuff like capitalism and meritocracy, while islam refused to do all of this. Also, the colonialism excuse is just lazy and mainly used by tribalist Arabs as an excuse. Same way Pan-Africans use it as an excuse for Africa's failings.
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